Thursday, November 19, 2015

Should being drunk in public from alcohol intoxication be a crime?

What Is Legal Alcohol Intoxication?

Legal alcohol
intoxication is a definition that varies across cities, states and
countries. In fact, there is no common way that legal jurisdictions
define what it means to be intoxicated by alcohol in public. This makes
it hard to define what it actually MEANS to be intoxicated by alcohol in
public.

What’s more,
doctors even have problems diagnosing intoxication, because specific blood
alcohol content or alcohol consumption in and of themselves do not define
intoxication. Instead, medical definitions of alcohol intoxication are linked
to displays of impairment, as are legal definitions.

As a result,
alcohol intoxication is rarely legally defined using scientific terms that are
precise (except for blood alcohol levels that define use of a motor
vehicle). This makes intoxication in public very subjective to
define. In other words, law enforcement officers can and do base their
decisions on whether a person is drunk or not on the BEHAVIORS associated with
intoxication. This is how laws can become subject to interpretation in
the hands of the police.

Docile Vs. Disruptive Drunks

People who are drunk in public can be either docile or cause
disruption. In disruptive cases, drunk people disturb the peace by being
loud, causing fights, destruction of property, etc. And in these cases,
it seems pretty clear that disruptive drunks break social code by comitting
anti-social acts. But what about the docile drunks? Is the mere
POTENTIAL for disorderly conduct and the ASSUMPTION that drunks in public will
disturb the peace enough to arrest and charge someone for intoxication?

Is Drunkenness Itself a Crime?

Laws exist to
protect the public. But docile drunks seem to do harm to no one but
themselves. So should we really punish people who are harming themselves?

Laws about Being Drunk Enforce Moral Judgments

The degree to
which a society can accept another person’s personal choice is the degree to
which that society shows tolerance. When being drunk in public becomes a
crime, simply for the sheer moral judgment that drunkenness (not the behavior
associated with intoxication) is not acceptable, a society declares that it
does not respect personal choice and that it will control the behavior of its
people through governance.